GKN celebrates technology centre opening

GKN Aerospace's Global Technology Centre will focus on sustainable aviation research and development. At full capacity the collaboration centre will host 300 engineers.

GKN Aerospace has held an aviation forum to celebrate the opening of its Global Technology Centre (GTC) in Bristol, UK. The event, titled ‘shaping a sustainable future of flight’, brought together the wider UK aerospace community and helped promote collaboration in the industry.

The 10,000 sq m centre focuses on sustainable aviation research and development including hydrogen propulsion technologies, advanced composite structures for electric aircraft, additive manufacturing, and industry 4.0 processes to enable the high rate production of aircraft structures. The GTC has already delivered the first fully-integrated wings, empennage and EWIS to Eviation for the Alice all-electric aircraft. The centre also serves as the base for GKN's £54 million hydrogen-propulsion development programme H2GEAR, in addition to GKN's technology partnership in the Airbus 'Wing of Tomorrow' technology programme.

The GTC was jointly funded by GKN for £17 million and the UK Government for £15 million, through the Aerospace Technology Institute. At full capacity, the collaboration centre will host 300 engineers from GKN Aerospace and its partners. It also includes a training centre, affiliated to Weston College, to provide technical skills and help develop the next-generation of aerospace engineers.

Speakers at the event included Trevor Higgs, general manager of Airbus UK; Paul Stein, chief technology officer of Rolls-Royce; GKN CEO David Paja; and John Pritchard, president of GKN's Civil business.

In addition to keynote speeches, two panel discussions were held, the first focused on: ‘Building a more sustainable and better connected future of flight’ and the second on ‘Developing the workforce of the future’. An academic zone also displayed sustainable aviation solutions of the future proposed by students from Bath, UWE and Bristol Universities, with further academic input from GTC partner institutions including Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle Universities.

“GKN Aerospace is fully committed to a more sustainable future and in helping the industry achieve its target of net zero emissions by 2050. That work has already started and this Global Technology Centre is at the forefront of it,” says Paja. “We have already delivered major aerostructures for all-electric aircraft and our break-through hydrogen development is laying a clear path to zero emissions flight. However, no single technology and no one company can tackle this challenge alone. It will take industry-wide collaboration, technical innovation and strong partnerships to achieve a truly sustainable future of flight.”